A Year in Reading: Malcolm Jones

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I’ve been reading Utterly Uncle Fred, an anthology of the three P.G. Wodehouse books featuring the madcap octogenarian party boy and all-around cutup. His full name is Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, 5th Earl of Ickenham. Uncle Fred to his familiars and Uncle Dynamite to his fans. Actually I don’t know that he’s over 80, but he has more zip and sparkle than all the youngish members of the Drones Club put together. I pray that I live long enough to follow his errant but shining example.

Krin Gabbard has written on jazz, cinema, and psychoanalysis. His most recent book is Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture, published this year by Faber and Faber. He is currently writing an interpretive biography of Charles Mingus.Few novels have grabbed me as much as Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I was reluctant to read this author because of the Laura Ashley movie that his previous novel, The Remains of the Day, had been turned into. But one day a friend whose opinions I value handed me a copy, so I thought I'd give it a tumble. The novel takes its title from a beautiful song by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, recorded most memorably by the great jazz pianist Bill Evans. The narrator of the novel has special feelings about this particular song, so if you know it, the book has even more power.The premise of Never Let Me Go sneaks up on you as slowly as do the characters. Early on you realize that the narrator is recalling a childhood in an exclusive private school where none of the students seem to have parents. By the halfway mark, it is clear that they are all test-tube babies, produced solely for the purpose of providing organs for people deemed more worthy by British society. Ishiguro tells you that each clone makes four donations, but he inspires a measure of grim speculation because he never tells you what those donations actually are. He does tell you that after the fourth donation the donor is usually little more than a vegetable if he or she survives at all.The book takes place in the present, and because the sci-fi element is never played up, you mostly find yourself assessing the entirely reasonable thoughts of the main characters. I think that's what most stays with me. How these perfectly normal people - who are capable of love, pettiness, and even cruelty - live in a world where they are regarded as utterly disposable. At the same time, I admire the book's wide-open allegorical resonance. Is the reaping of organs from cloned humans actually about slavery, about the caste system, about late capitalism, about the fleeting nature of human existence? These and multiple other interpretations are readily available, and yet that's not what the book is really about. Several months after reading it, I still think about the rich, inner lives that the doomed characters nevertheless lead.More from A Year in Reading 2008

The writing is so crisp and clear that each sentence left me hankering for the next. More than that, and this is rare in biography, the book left me fond of the subject. I once cheered on a bus when Hemingway shot himself on page 998.

Andre Agassi’s 2009 memoir, Open, wasn’t necessarily the best book I read this year -- Joshua Ferris’The Unnamed would probably claim that title -- but it was the most memorable, partly for the wrong reason.
For close to 400 pages, Agassi tells of his harrowing childhood, his hatred of tennis, his dreary marriage to Brooke Shields, and his devotion to his trainer, Gil Reyes, and his current wife, Steffi Graf. His matches and insecurities are detailed in a roiling, visceral style, and Open chugs along as if Agassi’s true peers are Hamill and Halberstam, not Sampras and Courier. There are flaws here, to be sure, but they have more to do with Agassi himself than his authorial potency. As I read, I kept flipping to the title page in search of a ghostwriting credit. There was none, and I was flabbergasted. In addition to being a legendary athlete, Agassi was also a hugely talented writer. Some guys have all the luck.
When I finished, though, I found the truth in the Acknowledgments: “This book would not exist without my friend J.R. Moehringer,” Agassi writes. This is an understatement: Moehringer -- Pulitzer-Prize winner and author of The Tender Bar -- pretty much wrote it himself. Though Agassi writes that Moehringer “felt ... that only one name belonged on the cover,” I felt utterly rabbit-punched. It was the only book I’ve ever read that betrayed me in such a way -- like finding that your cousin’s hilarious web video was directed by Adam McKay.
More from A Year in Reading 2011Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

Rivka Galchen'sAtmospheric Disturbances: It’s easy to read this book and be entranced by the protagonist, that lone man on a quest to find the wife who has been stolen from him and replaced by an impostor. But it’s the wife who finally broke my heart. Her story runs alongside and underneath his, submerged but now and then bubbling up through the sea foam of the story—a line of her distraught dialogue, a quick description of her crying quietly on the couch. We never hear her by straight route, we are dependent on his reportage. But still we see her with clarity. She struggles with him, yells at him. She is injured, bewildered, afraid. She runs after him, flies across the world to catch up with him. She is determined to keep him, even by deception. And when he tries to get away, she tells him simply that she will stay by his side, “until the end of time.”
It’s her faith that moves me. I wish it were my own. Don’t you, don’t we? Don’t we wish his illness explained our failures? That when our husband suddenly hates us, it’s not because he has fallen out of love with us. It’s not because we have done something unforgivable—or because we don’t know how to forgive him. Or because he can’t love, or we can’t, or because we are, at core, unlovable.
It’s because he has forgotten who we are.
If only we knew the right thing to say, the password (I will stay by your side until the end of time), he would come home.
More from A Year in Reading

It's that's time of year again. For the third year running, I have asked a number of writers, bloggers, and readers to answer the question, "what were the best books you read this year?" I'll begin posting the responses today, but this year I'd like to open that question up to everyone who reads The Millions, and I will share the responses here on the blog over the course of this month.These best books can be old or new, fiction or non-fiction, and primarily I'm interested in hearing about the books that you read this year that will stick with you long after the New Years parties are over. So, if you'd like, please send along the best books from your year in reading to my email.Update: I should have added this: When you send in your picks, give us a few sentences on what made your favorite books this year so great. (We've got some good responses so far. I'll be posting them over the next few weeks.)

I spent more of 2010 than I care to admit working through a spell of writer’s block, brought on not because I didn’t have a project, or even because I doubted that I could finish that project, but because I was briefly and thoroughly convinced that none of it mattered, that of all of the things a person could do with their time, writing a novel was the least likely to improve anyone’s quality of life. The disasters seemed so much bigger than words, and even those crises that were crises of culture rather than climate seemed impermeable. I would watch cable news and think that language had lost all meaning, that my faith in books as a vehicle for empathy and understanding had been naïve and misguided, because empathy was dead.
The two books that most stood out to me this year spoke broke through that haze by reminding me what language can still do. They spoke to the anxieties of the present without being nihilistic or unrealistic about the future. They reminded me, during a year when I spent so much time battling my own distraction that I actually went back to writing longhand, how it felt to be so completely absorbed with a book that I didn’t notice my laptop or my cell phone, or, on one occasion, my metro stop, but also left me ultimately feeling more responsible for the world I live in, instead of more isolated from it.
The first was Isabel Wilkerson’sThe Warmth of Other Suns, a beautifully written and researched account of the great migration. The book expanded my understanding of a story I thought I knew and did a wonderful job of balancing the epic scope of the project with the intimate details of the lives of individuals. It’s hard to tell the story of pre civil-rights movement America without some degree of optimism, because it’s hard to read accounts of the way things were—from the brutal violence of both the U.S south that African-Americans fled and the U.S north that burned down neighborhoods rather than accept them as neighbors, to the quieter brutality of travelers being forced into lonely, unsafe drives because there was no where in the country for a black travel to safely rest—and not think about how much we take for granted now. But Wilkerson resists the reductive optimism of leaving it at that by exploring the ambiguous nature of some of the progress made, and by refusing to force her subjects into being symbols rather than human beings. I think a lot about the ways in which the recent black experience in America has been in some ways similar to an immigration experience, and in making the case that for many families, it was an actual immigration experience, Wilkerson linked the past and the present and reminded me that the past was not so long ago and the future is never set in stone.
The second book was Jennifer Egan’sA Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan did a beautiful job of filtering large anxieties—about time, about technology, about pop-culture, about the limitations of human connection—and making them breathe on the page, through a cast of characters who felt fully alive. After spending so much time this year listening to people weigh in on technology—technology and the future, technology and the book, technology and empathy—it was exciting to see Egan play with that anxiety in the novel form, by letting the question of technology become a question of aesthetics. The aesthetic choices engaged the question without providing a neat or heavy-handed answer. By the time the book shifted to the imagined future, I was grieving less for the loss of the world as I knew it, and more for the private tragedies of Egan’s characters, which were somehow not lost in either the playfulness of the novel’s form or the shift in forms of communication in their new present.
Other favorite new reads for this year: Dwayne Betts’Shahid Reads His Own Palm, Sandra Beasley’sI Was the Jukebox,Lauren Groff’sDelicate Edible Birds, Jennine Capo Crucet’sHow to Leave Hialeah.
More from a Year in Reading 2010Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions